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The sight of a cash-flow statement or long-term budget can drain
the blood from the face of even the toughest small-business
owner. Managing business finances can get very complicated,
especially if you have multiple credit cards, bank accounts and
employees to track.

The solutions to the problem can likewise be vexing. Professional
accountants are expensive, and it takes serious time and effort
-- plus some do-it-yourself fortitude -- to master tricky
accounting software such as QuickBooks.

This is the pain that inDinero, a cloud-based financial tracking
service, is designed to relieve, as the San Francisco-based
company behind it promises to "put your business finances on
auto-pilot." We've been testing this tool here in my small
digital-content company, and while the product isn't quite as
simple as advertised, it does offer a reasonable -- and free
-- entry-level service for small business owners.

The service is similar in style and substance to personal-finance
tracker Mint.com. Here's what inDinero can and can't do for your
small business:

What You
Get
An Internet-based fiscal modeling tool, inDinero continuously
pulls in information from various credit-card and bank accounts,
along with electronic payment services such as PayPal. It
generates a comprehensive view of your business finances, served
up on attractive, easy-to-read Web browser dashboards. It has
budgeting tools based on previous transactions, alert functions,
fiscal targeting tools and stats such as cash flow, income and
spending.

InDinero gets paid by the number transactions it tracks per
month. A free account tracks just 50 every 30 days, which may not
cover your business needs. For $29.95 per month, you can track
500 transactions, while $99.95 per month buys unlimited tracking.
There are no contracts, and you can upgrade or cancel anytime.

What you might like: The budget tool does a good
job of automatically categorizing your expenses, using
information it pulls in from your accounts. For more complex
tasks, inDinero data can be imported into other programs such as
Quickbooks or Excel. You can share access to your account with as
many employees as you wish, since there's no limit on the number
of users.

The inDinero service gives small shops quick and useful financial
intelligence. We set ours up in less than 30 minutes. Even if
you're not planning to use the service long-term, a quick
financial check-up using a free account might be worth a look.

What you might not like: The feature set of
inDinero may be too limited for larger shops because it's an
analytical tool, not a full-blown accounting program. It's useful
for a basic understanding of a business's overall finances, and
its predictive features can help you with broad planning, but
detailed spending and budgeting control will need to be done
elsewhere.

The software can import transactions from other services, but it
needs user-defined labels to master some company transactions. To
get a truly accurate picture, plan on confirming and adding some
entries manually or uploading your own spreadsheets. For example,
credit-card expenses that were entered in our accounting package
needed to be manually compared to the card data imported with
inDinero, to ensure that there was no double entry.

Pricing is also an issue. The 50 transactions that come with the
free service won't be adequate for many small businesses. At the
same time, $30 a month is a lot for a financial analysis tool.

Finally, there are nagging issues of security, as inDinero is yet
another service that requires access to your most intimate
financial details, passwords and accounts. So you need some sort
of auditing system, and at least a basic password upgrade policy,
to protect your data.

Bottom line: The inDinero service takes some of
the fear out of business finances. Sole proprietors and very
small shops may appreciate having an easy-to-learn service to get
them up to speed on their books. The program takes lots of
information from disparate sources and serves it up in a visually
pleasing way.

But even a moderately-sized business may outgrow inDinero
quickly. Most firms have access to many of the functions inDinero
provides through tools they already use. And for an "automatic"
service, the tool took a surprising amount of babysitting to work
properly.